OpenStack Foundation Launches With $10M in Funding, 5600 Members

The OpenStack Foundation has officially launched boasting $10 million in funding and 5,600 members.

The OpenStack community has announced the formal launch of the new OpenStack Foundation to continue to promote the development and adoption of the open-source OpenStack cloud software.

As the independent home for OpenStack, the foundation has already attracted more than 5,600 individual members, secured more than $10 million in funding and is ready to fulfill the OpenStack mission of becoming the ubiquitous cloud computing platform.

"As a driving force behind OpenStack, Rackspace helped grow the community to where it is today, and now with the amazing support from more than 180 member companies, the Foundation is ready to take flight," said Lew Moorman, president of Rackspace, which co-founded the OpenStack project, in a statement. "As a member of the board, we look forward to working with the other members to continue building OpenStack to be the de facto standard open-source software for public and private clouds. We believe OpenStack and the OpenStack ecosystem is truly disrupting enterprise IT and we hear about it from our customers who are using our public and private cloud options available on OpenStack."

The goal of the OpenStack Foundation is to serve developers, users and the entire ecosystem by providing a set of shared resources to grow the footprint of public and private OpenStack clouds, enable technology vendors targeting the platform and assist developers in producing the best cloud software in the industry.

"The launch of the OpenStack Foundation is not only an important milestone for our community, but a defining moment for the open cloud movement," said Jonathan Bryce, executive director of the OpenStack Foundation, in a statement. "When you look at what this community has done to innovate and make cloud technologies accessible, as well as make open source synonymous with cloud computing, you understand why huge technology industry leaders and users across the world are placing their bets on OpenStack. The opportunity for OpenStack to become the open-source standard for cloud computing is real."

The open-source OpenStack software is free, as is membership in the OpenStack Foundation. Members are expected to participate in the OpenStack community through technical contributions or community building efforts.

Growth of the OpenStack platform continues on an upward trajectory, the foundation said. Founded in July 2010 by Rackspace and NASA with the support of 25 companies and a few dozen developers, OpenStack has since grown to more than 180 participating companies and 550 contributing developers producing six software releases in a little more than two years.

To date, Rackspace has been leading and investing in community management activities, but a year ago the company announced plans to establish an independent Foundation, recognizing the community was thriving and ready for a permanent home. Rackspace has now transitioned management activities and contributed the OpenStack trademark to the new foundation, creating even greater opportunity for diverse contributors and a vibrant ecosystem.

"Since its inception, we knew a foundation was the ultimate goal for OpenStack," Rackspace's Moorman said. "Today, we are proud to finalize the process by donating the assets, handing over community management and giving the OpenStack trademark to the OpenStack Foundation."

"Dell's commitment to OpenStack began more than two years ago as a way to help make the open-source cloud more accessible to our customers, and has resulted in Dell innovations like our OpenStack-Powered Cloud Solution and Crowbar, to help speed and ease deployment of cloud clusters," said John Igoe, executive director of Dell open source cloud and big data solutions, and OpenStack Foundation board member. "The choice for an open source-cloud is an important enabler for companies to build the cloud they need, and the formation of the OpenStack Foundation is an important milestone to signify the relevance of open source to customers."

"Enterprises and service providers deploying OpenStack are choosing Intel Architecture as the foundation of their clouds to optimize the performance, scalability, and security of their infrastructure," said Doug Fisher, corporate vice president of Software and Services Group at Intel. "Intel helps ensure that the building blocks of OpenStack, including operating environments such as Linux, KVM, and Xen, take full advantage of Intel Architecture."

In April 2012, intended Platinum and Gold Member companies formed a drafting committee to produce a set of bylaws and legal documents for community review. In July 2012, 5,000 individuals and eighteen companies ratified the foundation bylaws and legal documents by signing up as members. Currently, the Foundation has eight Platinum Members in AT&T, Canonical, HP, IBM, Nebula, Rackspace, Red Hat and SUSE, and 13 Gold Members in CCAT, Cisco, Cloudscaling, Dell, DreamHost, Mirantis, Morphlabs, NetApp, Piston Cloud Computing, Yahoo, with Intel, NEC and VMware joining in September. Additional new companies who have begun supporting the foundation as corporate sponsors include Brocade, eNovance, Gale Technologies, GridCentric, Huawei, Internap, Metacloud, PayPal, RiverMeadow Software, Smartscale Systems, Transcend Computing and Xemeti.

The Individual, Gold and Platinum members each make up a third of the Board of Directors, which provides strategic and financial oversight of foundation resources and staff. Alan Clark, Director of Industry Initiatives, Emerging Standards and Open Source at SUSE, was elected Chairman of the Board, and Lew Tucker, vice president and CTO of Cloud Computing at Cisco, was elected Vice Chairman of the Board.

"Our priorities and vision for the Foundation include strengthening the ecosystem, accelerating adoption and empowering the community to deliver the best cloud software out there," said Alan Clark, Chairman of the Board. "OpenStack's popularity and industry momentum calls for a solid operational foundation. The new board of directors is feverishly working to ensure that the Foundation is structured with the right executive leadership, staff, fiduciary models and controls all while looking to the priorities and vision for the Foundation. I am honored to serve and support this tremendously innovative community."

"The OpenStack Foundation represents a new era of establishing open-source standards for cloud computing based on multi-vendor collaboration," said Tucker. "The evolution of OpenStack to an independent foundation is a landmark achievement that reinforces the growing momentum and industry support that has galvanized around this organization and its mission."

The OpenStack Technical Committee will set the technical direction of OpenStack software development. The committee includes elected project technical leads from each of the core software projects. Tim Bell, operating systems and infrastructure services group leader at CERN, was appointed by the Board of Directors to help establish a new User Committee, created to represent a broad set of enterprise, academic and service provider users with the Technical Committee and Board of Directors.

The foundation is looking at hiring around 10 to 12 employees to maintain and coordinate the project's infrastructure, doing such things as managing systems for testing the software at scale, community building activities and managing the OpenStack trademark.

"Our common goal was to establish a governance model that would enable developers to innovate on the OpenStack platform, while maintaining the technical meritocracy of the OpenStack project," said Eileen Evans, vice president and associate general counsel, Cloud Computing and Open Source at HP and board member of the foundation.

"Today's announcement ushers in a new era for the cloud interoperability, enabling OpenStack to drive deeper industry collaboration and accelerate momentum for critical industry standards," said Angel Diaz, vice president of Software Standards at IBM. "Users in all industries can be confident betting on OpenStack with its growing number of members, strong user community, maturing technology and growing adoption."

More information about the OpenStack Foundation will be available at the OpenStack Summit, Oct. 15 to 18 in San Diego.

Darryl K. Taft covers the development tools and developer-related issues beat from his office in Baltimore. He has more than 10 years of experience in the business and is always looking for the next scoop. Taft is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and was named 'one of the most active middleware reporters in the world' by The Middleware Co. He also has his own card in the 'Who's Who in Enterprise Java' deck.